August 15, 2013

FozzTexx shows how he built a system that allows a Raspberry Pi to act as a Commodore 64 Disk Drive. His C-64 is tricked out with an Ethernet card so he shows us how he can pull a directory listing from the Raspberry Pi drive and loads an internet browser. It works but isn’t really usable for anything modern. The drive access is very slow due to the speed limitation of the C-64 bus. The software is available for free on Github.

3 Responses to “Raspberry Pi acting as a Commodore 64 Disk Drive”

You got a RasPi to act as a Commodore Disk Drive….you mean you got it to overheat ? LOL….I was referring to the 1541 and its heat problem. Awesome retro project ! Can’t wait to see where this can go…..Funny…the reference of the access being slow due to the speed limitation of the C64 bus…..

Yea heat was sure a problem but I remember the knock of death when they couldn’t read a disk the head would knock against the internal stop to try to correct the alignment (causing it to go out of alignment and need a trip to the shop).

I have to admit, though, that for all of the problems w/the various peripherals, the nice thing about the VIC-20 and C-64 (and the comparable Ataris as well) was that they were simple enough that you could get your head around pretty much everything there was to learn about them … even the OS was fairly well documented by various people.